Blog

Deuteronomy 31:3 “The Lord your God Himself crosses over before you; He will destroy the nations from before you; and you shall dispossess them.”

I’ve had conversations with multiple Christians who have issues with passages like this one. “How can the God that I know and love be the author of such genocide?” some have told me. “How could He completely destroy a people—including innocent children?”

My inadequate answer in the Bible’s defense is that God needed to keep Israel pure. “But doesn’t that directly violate Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies? A good God wouldn’t want to wipe out entire nations, would He?”

Yes. No. Maybe.

Remember, He had reluctantly erased the entire world in the flood. The problem, as I see it, wasn’t so much the individuals, even though they chose to rebel. They loved families. They married and gave in marriage it says. But they also loved and hungered for sin. He could no longer look on them as His creation when all He saw was the disease of sin. To protect the world and give humanity a future and a hope, he had to do some radical surgery.

Israel, on the other side of the flood, bore the promise. Because of that, they were His special, consecrated people. In order for them to live up to their calling as witness to the world, they needed to be pure and holy. God, jealous for their purpose, needed them to obey Him and to kill those who would lead them into sin.

But how can that harmonize with the New Testament?

Jesus said, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.”

God saw Israel as one people. As a doctor will fight for the health of his cancer patient by attacking the invading cells with every tool in his arsenal, so God wants us to defend holiness and attack sin. Before Christ, God’s focus was the nation of Israel. Afterwards, it became the believer. On either side of that artificial line, the warfare against sin needs to be brutal and violent. To be a holy people, we need hate sin.

Jesus gave many instructions on how to begin the battle. He told the young man who loved his wealth to sell all he had in order to sever the bonds that covetousness had tied around his heart. The would-be follower who wanted to wait for an inheritance was told to let the dead bury their own. Jesus dove to core of the delaying tactic—the man loved honor and family more than God.

The heart of the battle, whether Old Testament slaughter or New Testament sanctification, is the preservation of purity and the fight against sin. We need to be aggressive surgeons who cut away concealing layers to allow the Master Healer to work. He, in turn, will cut away every sin we reveal.